Readout of the Vice President's Meeting with President Erdogan of Turkey

Vice President Biden met today with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about bilateral relations and the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL). The Vice President thanked Turkey for hosting and providing humanitarian aid to large numbers of refugees from Iraq and Syria. The two leaders discussed the urgent need to build a broad-based coalition to defeat ISIL through a variety of means, including military actions, efforts to stop terrorist financing, countering flows of foreign fighters into the region, and delegitimizing ISIL's extremist ideology. The Vice President and President Erdogan agreed that ISIL was a regional threat and therefore required a regional strategy to be defeated. The two leaders also pledged to work together to provide humanitarian relief to refugees and internally displaced persons in the region.